The Reagan Democrat delusion

Whenever Democrats lose votes, pundits crow that they've lost the working class. Not so, though they have alienated unions

Ronald Reagan, US president (1980-88), during his former career as an actor, in a publicity still with co-star in the 1951 film Bedtime for Bonzo. Reagan is often credited with winning over many blue-collar Americans for the Republican party, although this is exaggerated. Photograph: Reuters

After an election where they saw their biggest single loss since 1938, in which the populist conversation was steered by the Tea Party movement, Democrats face an identity crisis as the party of the underprivileged. Sensing panic, pundits have invoked the spectre of the "Reagan Democrat", that fickle creature who strikes fear into liberals insecure about their ability to connect with Real Americans.

As the story goes, sometime in the 1970s, Democrats abandoned their once loyal blue-collar base for (take your pick) Hollywood, Wall Street, environmentalism, feminism, free trade and/or gay rights. And they are now paying the price. But there are a few problems with this narrative.

First and foremost is that Reagan Democrats never really existed. True, a large number of Democrats did vote for Reagan. And by now, the expression has become cable news shorthand for a variety of stereotypes, whether blue-collar values voters or suburbanite independents. But the term "Reagan Democrats" was originally coined to describe something much more specific: union members who supported Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.

As a trend, this was greatly exaggerated. Only one major union, the Teamsters, actually endorsed Reagan. This was in no small part due to Reagan's relationship with the famously mobbed-up Teamster VP (later president) Jackie Presser, whom he named his labour adviser. Presser, who at the time was working for both the Cleveland mafia and the FBI as an informant, threw his union's weight behind Reagan, both in 1980 and 1984, in exchange for a pledge by Reagan to call off a justice department corruption investigation into Teamster leadership.

Of course, Reagan went on to become one of the most anti-union presidents in history. So, whatever rewards Teamster members got out of the deal – aside from not seeing their leaders thrown in jail – are dubious. But for Republicans championing their blue-collar bona fides, the image of the Gipper surrounded by hardhats is the gift that keeps on giving.

Endorsements are one thing, though; voting is another. Every election cycle, journalists are astonished to discover union members don't always vote with their unions. This year, the Wall Street Journal reports that 44% of union members in Pennsylvania and 45% in Ohio voted Republican. Yet, this is far from extraordinary: even in a presidential election, unions are lucky to get 60% of their members to vote their way. Like all voters, union members have conflicting allegiances. And like all membership organisations, come election day, unions try to convince their rank and file to think of themselves as trade unionists first, and evangelicals or NRA members second, with varying degrees of success. When unemployment is at 10%, voting for the incumbent party is a tough sell, and a lot of voters, union or not, weren't buying it.

So, a better question is, did Democrats ever have the working-class vote to begin with?

The percentage of voters earning less than $30,000 who voted for Democrats dropped from a record high of 68% in 2008 to 57% in 2010. But this number has consistently remained somewhere between 55% and 65% as far back as polling data go, which means that at least a third of the poorest Americans always vote Republican. The idea that any group would consciously vote "as a class" for one party has never found much purchase in American politics.

This story changes, though, when race comes into the picture. Rather than working-class flight from the Democrats, what we have seen is white flight. Democrats went from winning 54% of the white vote in 1982 to 38% today. The dropoff is starker still in the south, where Nixon's southern strategy led to an entire region flipping from blue to red within a generation.

In US electoral politics, "class" has never really meant class. Democrats are mostly allergic to the term "working class", preferring instead "middle class" as a euphemism for all things proletarian. Thus, working-class credentials get brought up more by Republicans to signify all sorts of things unrelated to income: such as, is a veteran, goes to church, likes fishing… and often, is white.

And this is the real subtext behind the Reagan Democrat motif: not that Democrats are losing touch with workers, but that they are losing touch with whites.

Unions, on the other hand, are showing no signs of abandoning ship. This year, they gave boatloads of cash to Democrats in exchange for practically nothing. There was no mention of the decades-old dream of labour law reform. Instead, unions pinned their hopes to infrastructure projects that Republicans are now likely to axe.

Public-sector unions in many states have also found themselves to be radioactive – and prime targets at a time of budget crises. In New York, Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo flatly told the labour-backed Working Families party that he didn't want their endorsement; they gave it to him anyway.

If they are looking for a silver lining to 2010, unions can do little more than say "it could have been worse." Perhaps the strongest message unions sent to Senate Democrats was not in helping to re-elect the embattled Harry Reid, but in not helping union foe Blanche Lincoln, who lost to Republican John Boozman after labour sat out the race.

Coming from a position of weakness, unions might learn that withholding support can sometimes be more effective than giving it. But that won't make unions or their members "Reagan Democrats", any more than they were before.